Sky of Swords

by Dave Duncan

  “With respect, sire, we are spiritually bound to protect your honored daughter from peril. She has inherited your own skill and daring on horseback, and obviously riding astride is safer than—”

  “She is not allowed to go steeplechasing!”

  The Commander was probably the only man in the kingdom who would have dared resist the royal anger at that level. “We cannot be guardians and governesses at the same time, sire. If Her Highness thinks we are spying on her and starts distrusting us, our duties will become impossible.”

  Purple-faced, Ambrose swung a blow at him. Hoare evaded it nimbly. He evaded its successor also, and the King did not try a third time.

  Alas! Within a week Sir Hoare was gone, replaced as Commander by a Blade Malinda had not previously met, Sir Durendal, newly returned from some mysterious mission overseas. He turned out to be one of the King’s closest toadies and quite impervious to both wiles and threats from the Heir Presumptive.

  When the long-awaited word came that another heir was on the way, Malinda celebrated as heartily as anyone, happy for her stepmother’s happiness. The King was ecstatic and typically overreacted. His attitude to enchantment had always been unpredictable. One year he would spend fortunes on good-luck charms and prophecies, and the next he would threaten to drive every conjurer from the realm. Now he decreed that the Queen must reside until her confinement at the remote palace of Bondhill; then he cleared the countryside for leagues around of every hint of spirituality. Alas, conjuration had its uses, and healing was one of them. The Queen was delivered of a healthy boy, but all the doctors’ efforts could not stop her bleeding. After days of futile efforts, they loaded her in a coach for a mad dash to the nearest remaining octogram. They were too late.

  Malinda mourned far more deeply for Haralda than she had for her mother. Many times she cursed her father’s stubborn folly, although never when she might be overheard.

  To his credit, the King was devastated. For months he rarely appeared in public, and Lord Chancellor Montpurse ran the kingdom. It was during those months that Princess Malinda crossed the mystic bridge into womanhood. Although she was no longer heir, only her missing father and infant brother outranked her—a heady and dangerous position for a fourteen-year-old. When she entered a room, everyone rose; men stepped aside and bowed when she walked a hallway; she alone was entitled to a cloth of estate above her chair. Haralda’s steadying hand had gone, but neither the distraught King nor the overworked Chancellor realized that no other had taken its place. Lady Wains, her token governess, was sliding into a contented dotage.

  Already her household had grown beyond counting, like a weed-filled garden. It included lords and ladies she had never met, such as the octogenarian Earl of Dimpleshire, hereditary cupbearer to the monarch’s oldest daughter. In the absence of a queen, every aristocratic wife in the country was anxious to be appointed an honorary lady-in-waiting to the Princess, although few of them ever came to court. They also wished their marriageable daughters to be maids of honor. They especially wanted their unmarriageable daughters, unwed aunts, and widowed mothers out of their way and living at the King’s expense. The task of sorting out the politics and keeping Malinda’s actual retinue to a manageable yet respectable three or four ladies-in-waiting and four or five maids of honor belonged to Lady Crystal, her matron companion. No one in her right mind would have taken on that job voluntarily, but Crystal’s family, the Candlefens, had been out of favor for many years. Her appointment was a sort of probation for all of them, a first step in a rehabilitation that might take a generation. She was a frail, ineffectual woman, so terrified of incurring royal displeasure that Malinda found her easy to manipulate.

  Lady Arabel remained Mistress of the Robes. She had distributed her numerous children around the minor gentry of the land as pages or maids of honor, but the problem of finding future dowries for the girls weighed heavily on her, making her utterly dependent on Malinda’s favor. Her greatest value in Malinda’s eyes was her instinct for gossip—mistress of the rumors, Malinda called her.

  There was Dian de Fait. Not being of noble blood, she could rank no higher than servant, but soon after Queen Haralda’s death, Malinda maneuvered her into the stewardship post of Lady of the Bedchamber. Then Dian could help support her mother, whose new husband back on Ness Royal provided little except more children.

  Wains, Crystal, Arabel, and Dian—those four comprised Malinda’s innermost, constant household. Around them flourished a rose garden of ladies-in-waiting and maids of honor, and beyond them stood a veritable forest of servants and officials. Courtly titles were often misleading. Her comptroller was a clerk in the office of Chancery, but her chamberlain was one of the Brintons, distant ducal cousins who must be kept happy with a few meaningless appointments. Her master of the horse was Baron Leandre, a closer cousin still, but a courtly fop who did not know a horse from a mule.

  After Haralda’s death, Malinda was pretty much her own mistress. She moved with the court from palace to palace throughout the year—Nocare, Oldmart, Greymere, and others—staying out of her father’s way as much as possible. By now she knew most of the aristocracy of Chivial, so from time to time she would choose an interesting-sounding country house close to Grandon and invite herself and her train to visit. Lady Wains would sign anything put in front of her and Chancery would return it sealed with the King’s approval. Whether or not he had seen it was immaterial. These excursions were a welcome escape from the million sharp eyes at court.

  That she did not stumble into any major scandals during this period was a tribute to her native common sense. If her needle wit made enemies, they were content to bide their time.

  When the King took up the scepter again, his puzzling cygnet had become an oversized swan, the cynosure of court. Like many another father before him, he was somewhat at a loss when dealing with the young woman who had unexpectedly replaced his girl child. He let her have her head as long as she behaved herself; she took care not to cross him.

  Their truce prospered; by the time she turned sixteen, late in 367, he was boasting of her abilities to ambassadors and letting her act as official hostess at state banquets. He had Chancellor Montpurse swear her in as a privy councillor—while making it clear that she would not actually attend meetings. He held a very impressive state ball in honor of her birthweek, thus cuing the Lord Mayor of Grandon to offer her the keys of the city and Parliament to pass an address of congratulation.

  One guest necessarily invited to the celebrations was her betrothed, Lord Ansel, now a sandy-haired sprat of eleven whose head did not reach her shoulder. At her age many ladies were already married or even mothers, while she still had at least another five years of spinsterhood to look forward to, followed by a lifetime of Ansel. He pleaded indisposition, a timely attack of chicken pox.

  His mother came, though. “Very fortunate!” she barked in her customary tactless fashion. “He’s even more relieved than you are. If you don’t fancy the match, think how it looks to him. His wife is always going to outrank him. Even if he starts shaving early, you’ll be an old woman of at least twenty-one, and probably a foot taller.”

  Still, that ghastly wedding day was a long time off yet. As the year 368 began, Princess Malinda was enjoying her life at court. She was unquestioned leader of the younger set, flirting mildly with young male aristocrats or Blades as she fancied, but careful never to give the old cats any scandal to whet their claws. She did not love her father, thinking of him as a sort of semidomesticated dragon, a useful guardian to be tiptoed around, never disturbed. She was even losing her fear of him, which was to prove a serious error. The terrible Night of Dogs shocked her—and a great many other people—into realizing that Ambrose IV was mortal and the country needed him. For a brief period, father and daughter were brought together by real danger.

  3

  Palaces always have secret doors.

  SIR SNAKE

  A bell tolled in the distance, punctuating the winter night with heavy,
mournful strokes. Neither asleep nor quite awake, Malinda wondered fuzzily why. Then…women screaming, doors slamming, male voices shouting. She sat up and dragged the topmost quilt around her shivering shoulders, even as the chamber door creaked open and candlelight flickered through chinks where the bed curtains did not quite meet.

  “My lady?” Dian squeaked. “My lady!”

  “Who is there, Dian?” Malinda found the relative calmness of her own voice gratifying, if certainly misleading.

  “Swordsmen! Blades! Not the Guard!”

  “Swordsmen” might mean revolution and a squad of assassins, and Blades would be serving their ward, who might not be the King. Only the Guard was unquestionably loyal to the sovereign and his heirs. Not the Guard…

  “My cloak! What do they want?”

  “Emergency, Your Grace,” said a baritone. “Sir Snake, knight in the Order. Remember me?” Heavy tread crossed the room. “You may be in danger. You will come with us at once, please. You and no more than two companions.”

  Shutters slammed. Bolts slid—ridiculous! This chamber was two stories above the courtyard. More boots entering…Dian stuffed a heavy cloak in through the draperies.

  “Shoes, any shoes.” Malinda pushed a leg out while she was still pulling the cloak around her; she hauled off her absurd nightcap. She felt Dian slide a shoe onto one foot, and provided the other. As she slid down off the bed and out through the curtains, her hair tumbled loose around her. The room was already full of armed men bearing lanterns, with frightened and disheveled women peering through between them. She recognized only two faces—Sir Snake and Sir Jarvis. Out in the antechamber, old Lady Wains was shrieking in confused terror above a continuo of younger hysterics.

  “You come with me!” Malinda jabbed a finger at Dian, who was wearing only a nightgown. “And you, Lady Crystal. Arabel, see that the racket out there stops immediately.”

  “This is monstrous!” Crystal cried shrilly. “Who are these men? Summon the Guard! Her Highness will not—”

  She was drowned out by shouting as the swordsmen hustled the unwanted women away. Sir Jarvis shut and bolted the chamber door behind them, leaving six men, Malinda, Crystal, and Dian inside.

  Malinda’s heart circled the inside of her chest like a trapped bat. Still the great bell tolled, more faintly now. At least three Blades guarded her apartment at night, so these intruders had either killed them to gain admittance—which was highly improbable—or the Blades had gone rushing off to protect their ward, the King. That implied a major threat. “What is the danger, Sir Snake? And why have you locked us in here with no—”

  “Back door, my lady.” Sir Snake was well named, being exceedingly lean and having a reputation for subtlety. He had been Deputy Commander before Sir Dreadnought. “This way, if you please.”

  Another man had tugged a section of paneling loose, making it creak open on reluctant hinges. Yet another stepped through the gap, and the light of his lantern gleamed on the damp stone walls of an extremely narrow passage. “May be easier if you carry this lantern, mistress,” Snake added cheerfully. “Look out for puddles.”

  Malinda found her voice. “I did not know about this way out!” More important, she had not known about this way in.

  “Of course not. I’ll tell you when—” He took her arm.

  “Let go of me!” Pushing past Crystal’s protests and efforts to block her, Malinda marched forward and entered the secret passage.

  At first it was only a gap between two false walls, its ceiling out of sight. It turned a couple of corners and divided, but she followed the light of her guide’s lantern hurrying ahead. Her mind roiled with tales of ancestors fleeing by night, flames of rebellion licking at their heels—perhaps down this very corridor. Not revolution this time, she decided. If anything like that had been brewing, she would have heard rumors. No, the problem was undoubtedly conjuration.

  Steep stone stairs led down to a low tunnel of arched brick. Her slippered feet found the puddles Snake had mentioned. The air was stale, stinking of ancient mold.

  Conjuring orders had traditionally been exempt from taxation on the grounds that they performed healing and other good deeds, but there was no question that many of them sold curses and love philters, or even performed necromancy or enthrallment. For generations elementaries had been springing up all over Chivial, growing steadily richer and amassing enormous landholdings. Months ago Ambrose had demanded the authority to tax them—good economics and very dangerous politics. A prudent ruler would have proceeded more warily, but prudence was not in his bones.

  Parliament, usually so susceptible to royal bribery and menace, had balked. The orders’ enormous wealth could buy votes as well as he could, and the enchanters outdid him at intimidation. Chancellor Montpurse was in the fight of his life, with the Commons snarling at his ankles and the King snapping in his ears.

  Of course there must be cellars under the palace, but Malinda knew nothing about them. She passed several heavy doors closed and bolted, and went through others standing open; those she heard being shut after her companions had followed. She had not known of the secret door from her room. Those were not her usual quarters in Greymere. Just before Long Night the Lord Chamberlain had asked her to move, babbling about a planned renovation. Ha! It had not happened, and in any case renovations were always done in the summer when court was elsewhere. It had been more of Durendal’s scheming, obviously.

  Devious Commander Durendal had foreseen the danger from the conjurers, but even he could not increase the size of the Royal Guard faster than Ironhall could turn out new swordsmen. He had improvised by re-enlisting the knights, of whom there were plenty around, because a Blade was normally released from his binding in his late twenties. In effect the Commander had created a secret and illegal private army, misappropriating state funds in the process. Having wormed the story out of both Sir Eagle and Sir Shadow, Malinda was possibly the only person outside the Order who knew about it. She had considered dropping it in her father’s lap to see what would happen to Smarty Master Durendal then.

  Obviously she had waited too long.

  Eventually her guide led her to a low room with no other door, although shutters high on the walls must hide small windows and a rusty iron ladder in one corner led up to a trap in the roof. Icy cold, damp, and unwholesome, this crypt might reasonably be used to store wine or sea coal or even ice, but it presently held eight cots, a couple of benches, and some wicker hampers…probably a few rats also. The man who had led the procession was now stoking fresh logs into an iron stove in which a substantial fire was already burning. The room brightened as the rest of the party arrived with their lanterns—Dian, Lady Crystal, Sir Snake and one other man, who slammed the door and shot bolts. The rest of her escort must have remained behind to block pursuit.

  The men were dressed as courtiers, but their cat’s-eye swords marked them for Blades. Snake and Sir Bullwhip—a chunky, fair-faced man, whom she remembered as something of a dullard—and a pallid, blond one named…Victor? Yes, Sir Victor.

  “I demand an explanation!” Crystal hurried over to stand in front of Malinda as if prepared to defend her against imminent rape by three swordsmen. “His Majesty shall hear of this outrage! If there is danger, then where is the Royal—”

  “Hush!” Malinda said, gripping her shoulder.

  Like many a chaperone, Crystal worried more about appearances than reality—how would the court react when it heard that the Princess had been abducted in the middle of the night in her nightgown? To a cellar full of swordsmen? All three women were improperly dressed, with their hair unbound. Crystal was foreseeing a scandal and the King blaming her for it. The Candlefens would be ruined yet again.

  Dian, in contrast, was now smirking. “I can’t see any problem. Perhaps we should huddle together for warmth?”

  Lady Crystal squawked in horror and flapped her hands.

  “We can blow out the lights if you prefer.” Dian had no royal reputation to preserve. She had
always enjoyed cuddling and lately had discovered the joys of doing so with young guardsmen.

  Malinda hauled a blanket off a bed and went to stand by the stove while she wrapped it around herself. “Come here and get warm, ladies. An explanation if you please, Sir Snake.”

  “Monsters, my lady. Sir Bullwhip saw them better than I did.”

  “Dogs, Your Highness,” the chunky man said earnestly. “Dogs big as bulls, some of them. Hundreds of them. They seemed to be heading for the King’s quarters, my lady, but attacking anyone they saw on the way. They’re climbing up the palace walls and chewing through window bars and—”

  “Has he been drinking?”

  “It’s the truth,” Snake said, frowning.

  “I assume the Guard is defending my father?”

  “To the last man, if necessary. Knights like us are looking after your royal brother.”

  “So where are you taking me?” She was not dressed for ladders.

  “Nowhere, Your Grace. This is as safe as anywhere. We’re under the boathouse. If the enemy finds us here, we can fight our way out and leave by river. Otherwise we wait here until the danger has passed, then return to the palace.”

  She eyed the swordsmen angrily. They were hiding their amusement, but only just. “This is the Old Blades’ kennel, is it?”

  The uncertain light made Snake’s eyes twinkle, but his mouth was not smiling under his stringy mustache. “One of them. How do you know about the Old Blades?”

  “How did you know about a secret back door into my bedchamber?”

  He shrugged his narrow shoulders and now he did smile. “Palaces always have secret doors, Your Grace. They are a fiery-awful nuisance, because they have to be guarded all the time. I have spent many, many nights in this rat hole. And in others like it.”

  “But rarely alone,” Victor murmured softly.

  Secret doors and passages should not surprise her, for Ness Royal had several of them. Everyone was standing around, waiting for her to give them permission to sit.